It's important to remember, that the top mixers are normally working with less then stella productions.
One thing that can happen, is when we get better at beat making, our beats tend to sound good enough. We balance the sounds, and maybe apply some reverb etc... and it's good to go!
The problem when we compare to top mixers, is our mixes tend to sound vanilla.
A great quality production, can lead to a lazy mix down.
So, a trick we can do. Use crap headphones, your built in pc speakers. Any poor quality audio monitoring device. Produce your beat like this.
Then when you mix down, you will really have a big challenge to make it sound good.
This is where, all the bussing and saturation, long effects chains come into play.
The goal is to separate the mix from the production stage. And then create a unique mix with it's own colour and character.
No disrespect but, I rather share mixing tricks with a community that likes and appreciate my mixing tricks. I say if you have nothing positive or constructive to say about any of these producers style, mix, and unique style then don't say nothing. There are a couple of producers here that are over rated and sound just like all the producers here. There is also hardly any originality, but you don't se me hating or putting them down. Or even telling them how their beat should be made. Me personally I take CONTRUCTIVE criticism well, but that lacks here. I've voted on a lot of Battles and the hating and negativity in the comments was ridiculous before the update. There is no perfect mix. There is no perfect Master. As long as everything is loud enough with no clipping, compressed, and EQ'd right. The color and character is the recipe that makes you who you are
Your right but all that can be right with your own texture style and some know it all will fight you saying it’s not mixed or mastered right. That’s all I’m saying
Disagree. There is a perfect mix, and a perfect master. The one where the song sounds solid on anything you play it on. That's a perfect mix, and that is a perfect master.
Yeah some might want a more plain sounding mix, and others may want lots of saturation, or might be going for a certain vibe. I can understand that fa sho.
Some other mixing tricks are. Leave a big gap between, creating your beat and mixing it.
The life cycle of a beat, is a mysterious thing.
Think of your beats like templates. Don't hesitate, to go back to previous beats, and steal things from them.
Maybe you got the lead line right. Or the chords. What ever it is, it can be recycled.
This is maybe a bit hard, to reconcile nowadays.
In the old days, producers, use to create something new every time they went into the lab.
A big problem nowadays, is that people are working from the same template over and over again.
It's a programmatical perspective. They go to youtube, download the same drum sounds, same hot lead, same samples etc.
Everything becomes very homogenised. This is probably the biggest benefit of using hardware. You have an experimentation stage.
Of course you can do this with software. But you have to take time out from beat making, and just spend time exploring sounds and different musical ideas.
The general rule is, as long as you learn one new thing for every beat you make, your time is not wasted.
The truth is, quantity is not really valuable to anyone. You should always be trying to create the best beat you have ever made in your life!
And.... the next understanding is. As long as you really like what you are doing. It, doesn't really matter if other people do. The reward of choosing to do music. Is music itself.
Lol, ain't no money in this game!
Well I suppose you can advertise for female vocalists, but that will probably get you in trouble nowadays. Too many spoil sports imo.
If you going to write and mix your beat on the same day. Most of us don't have the luxury of running our monitors all the time, as they annoy other people.
So if your using heaphones, opt for a small light pair of cans. I use the dirty cheap song zx ones.
I have them at a low volume. The reason is, when you use the big bassey can's to write your beats on, by the time you finished, your ears are already very fatigued. The problem is, you don't notice your ears are tired. Use your big can's or your monitors for just putting in the big elements, like the main levels. And then check on the final mix with them, and tweak a bit.
On the subject of headphones. I never owned a pair of expensive cans in all my career as bobchops. I only recently bought some. I was surprised to say the least. I was expecting to be blown away by them. But actually I ended up sending both the expensive Mackie and Sony headphones back.
The Mackies, just sounded horrible. So BRIGHT! it was like having my ears scrapped. The expensive Sony ones, which were industry standard, sounded ok. But I actually much preferred the $40 extra bass sony headphones, I normally use as my heavy pair.
Bassy cans will make you tame the bass, the bright cans will make you tame the highs. So a mix on bass heavy cans will sound weak when played on different systems, and a mix done on bright cans, will sound LoFi on most other systems. A good solid, and low budget headphone is the Sennheiser HD280 Pro. You can get them for under $100 / pounds / Euros usually, and they are also included in many of the virtual mixrooms headphone models, so you can use a virtual mixroom like Abbey Road Studio 3, or CLA Nx, and kind of have the ability to mix on monitors while in your headphones. At least you have the ability to check your mix on those different modeled speakers in the virtual mixroom to have an idea of how your mix could sound on different setups. Also Slate VSX is an interesting system, and comes with it's own headphones.
A last ditch effort idea is to mix on the headphones you know and like and are familiar with. Get the mix to your liking, then check it with Tonal Balance Control to make any fine adjustments to be sure it will translate anywhere, and it will.
A good mix is hardly "vanilla". There can be plenty of character, and vibe in a great sounding mix. If we are talking about the top mixers like "Serban Ghenea" well we have to consider the context of how he receives material to mix.
Most of what he mixes is already "pre-mixed" by the producer. They usually send protools sessions with tons of plugins put on by the producer who did his own rough mix, and also had a lot of creative plugins in the mix as well. For instance like transient shapers, and Lofi bit crusher effects, or some plugin that overemphasizes the subs on a kick drum etc. Or they also perhaps added saturators, and other stuff to liven up the sound a bit. Since those are creative decisions, and the producer could really give a rip about aliasing or digital distortion, and somehow that was part of the vibe, Serban has to work within those parameters. So he will use a vanilla colorless plain digital EQ / channel strip across his whole session, and a few waves plugins (not the ones that emulate gear for the most part but the ones that do corrective stuff like RBass, De-esser). So his preferred weapon of choice is the Metric Halo Channelstrip. It is a solid channel strip, but adds no mojo. It is a simple digital EQ and compressor / gate. But it gets the job done. He is not needing to add color to a mix, so he uses that and gets great results because the mix is already full of color in the tracks to begin with.
He might add a cool reverb or a delay on vocals, but his job is to balance those tracks, and make them sound like a record, and he does it better than most.
My suggestion for mixing on cans is anything from Sennheiser / OLLO / AKG /Beyerdynamic. Then get Sonarworks Reference for Headphones, and flatten them, so you can mix on a perfect flat responding headphone. Once you make it sound perfect there, then EQ wise it will be great anywhere. The only problems mixing on cans is getting the volume levels correct, applying reverb, balancing vocals, and adding too much bass. While it sounds cool on cans to pump the bass, it will blow a driver on a huge loudspeaker like the ones DJ's use at the club or at shows. If you intend your music to be played there, should use better monitoring or metering to be sure your mix will sound good, and not kill speakers at the same time.
A tool to help when mixing or when mastering is Izotope Tonal Balance Control. The "bass heavy" curve is the one where most Billboard hits are aiming for. I checked a few and they all seem to follow the bass heavy curve, not the genre specific curves, although they have been useful when I mixed Jazz records, and classic contemporary RnB styles.
Ok, I got complacent. You must adjust your levels on loud speakers. No matter how well you know your headphones, they just don’t reproduce things the same way.
That said you can still do most of your mix on cans. Things like reverb and delays etc are just nice doing on cans.
I am really amazed, again how different things work on speakers.
That said, I don’t like to write beats where I am just worried about the end mix down.
I am strong believer that it’s better to separate the stages.
I can totally hear when people are making musical choices based on their end mix down.
Normally it’s like their beat don’t have much life to it, or only works if you listen to it at high volume.
Really the beat should sound strong enough musically with no mix down.
The benefits on mixing with cans is being able to hear all the tiny details you might miss on speakers. The downside to mixing on cans is getting the volume levels correct. Especially when mixing vocals, and people have a tendency to make the reverb too wet when mixing on cans, that shows up glaringly bad on speakers.
Think about the way people listen to music today. Earbuds. Rarely do I ever see anyone using a system using speakers at home. Car speakers are more common and they have a different deal as well. But again, look at the current audience and mix to said majority.
Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro 250 Ohm and the Rupert Neve RNHP are my go to for mixing. My latest mixes uses this combination and they have allowed me to make much better mixing choices that translates to care, phone, and computer headphone listening.
Problem with that is... earbuds do not produce the entire audio spectrum. Your goal if you are your own mixing engineer is to get mixes that translate everywhere. You need to focus on getting the midrange correct, but do not neglect your subs, and treble. Most issues with producers on here is that they over compensate on the subs. They have bass clashing with the kick drum, and basslines that bleed into the sub range with the kick drum and 808. Those headphones are quite nice, but once again, getting your levels correct. You never want to mix only for the most common listening environment. You never want to mix on airpods because that mix will not translate well to the car, but also have we forgotten, the club. Artists will be performing to these songs live, and you don't want an airpod mix going to the club environment.
I think you can use those headphones for making EQ decisions because you can hear the details, but to set your volume faders, you need to do that on speakers. Bear in mind you will also make bass heavy mixes on headphones because you are not feeling the bass when you mix like you would if you worked that out on a subwoofer. But your subwoofer needs to be in balance with your nearfield monitors or you will cut too much bass as well.
If you have 8in monitors then you don't need a subwoofer. But yeah, don't skimp on your monitoring. Even if you mix in a shitty room, if you are used to that room, then you can use it. But you can't compensate much for shitty monitoring. You will make bad decisions on everything with bad monitors.
but having the room designed with bass traps etc, for reflections.. is hard.
I have 5inch mackie monitors and the sub.
there good! But I can't use them and have not for years.
I just mix on cans because I don't want to get complaints from the neighbours.
Nowadays...
it's hard to justify putting in time on big mixes of beats.
ok if you have a project. But nowadays I only feel that I would really put hard work into mixing, when I make a beat that lives up to my beat making hero's.
If I make a beat that makes me feel like "we there now".
I would go in on the mixing.
Is it even possible for that to happen for me now?
the music I like is from over a decade ago. And the producers in those days had crazy motivation because they wanted to be a super producer. And the money was big!
nowadays producing is different. Would those dope producers who got me interested in this, even get any recognition today?
I look at my game now, and realise, there's a lot of things those master producers could do that I don't know how to do.
just having that weird perfect taste they have. Maybe that's a biology thing, and not something that can be fixed.
some people naturally have a weird brain that hears things in a weird way.
Just heard it. Sounds great! Didn't know they had a free version! I really like the digital reverb they have and that limiter seems to warm things up pretty nice.
In my humble opinion I think that modern music can benefit from a vintage sound and workflow.
Think of mixing and mastering in 3 stages.
Recording - Mixing - Mastering.
Recording (even if you are totally in the box).
You would typically go to a studio back in the day to record, and get everything "tracked" to 24 inch reel to reel tape.
During that process your music would come off your keyboard, drum machine etc, and then assigned to 2 mono tracks or 1 on the board, then to the tape. Along the way that signal from your MPC or ASR-10 or EPS etc would hit a preamp, then the channel strip of the console, then out to the tape machine.
How would you do this process in the box? Well, while making the beat you obviously are going to assign your sounds to tracks on your mixer in your DAW. Then add a console channel strip first on your channel, then a tape plugin. Pick whatever channel strip you like as long as it has some saturation, and vibe. Think of the Waves Magma channel strip, or Lindell 80 series or the Lindell 50 series, whatever you like as your tracking board sound. You could use the Slate VCC, and pick a console sound from that. Then after the channel strip, then add your tape plugin. So, UAD Studer, Softube tape, Slate VTM, TB Reelbus etc. Do this on all channels.
Next, export your stems / tracks.
Now you could re-import them into your DAW, or use a different one that has a better workflow for mixing. I like to use Harrison Mixbus 32C, but you could import your project into protools, or reaper, or back into FL Studio if you want, I think Reason has an SSL console in the software as the mixer, just know this is now a mixing session.
Back in the day during mixing, that would be done on a console, sometimes in the same studio, but not uncommon to do it in a different studio.
During the mixing, you would pick a channel strip that is clean sounding, so think SSL channel strips either from SSL themselves or from any 3rd party software maker that makes emulations of SSL console channel strips. So Waves, Plugin Alliance, UAD etc. You don't have to worry about this if you are using Harrison Mixbus, Reason, or Cakewalk, as they already have the console setup for you.
Setup your master bus processing, that can be for many using the "God Particle" which is all you need on your master bus in my opinion, or use a SSL bus compressor. In Harrison Mixbus, Reason, and Cakewalk you already have the master bus setup for you. You can choose to use the stock master bus processing it is perfectly fine. For those using FL Studio, Protools etc, you will need the God Particle or an SSL bus comp on your master bus. Also add a tape plugin on your master bus too, as all mixes were printed to master tape back in the day.
Do your mix, then glue the mix with the master bus processing, then export your wav file of your mixing session.
Now on to mastering, usually your mix that was printed to master tape would then go to a mastering house. You can choose to use an online mastering service, if your mix is good and you are happy with the results, that would be fine, or you can make a new session in your DAW for a mastering session. Some plugins that are popular for mastering are Ozone of course, BX Masterdesk, Fabfilter total bundle, or create your own mastering chain probably with Bax EQ, shadowhills mastering compressor, a tape machine plugin (yes another one), a limiter, a multiband compressor, a clean digital EQ like a stock one or pro Q3 etc. Fix the tonal balance, make it loud, but not too loud, and make sure it sounds great everywhere. Then export to WAV or Mp3 or M4a or FLAC etc, and distribute your music. Back in the day they would make a hard copy master for you to send to distribution to make your CDs, tapes, records etc for you to sell in stores, or to distribute how you like.
I think if you stick to this process, your music will always sound great.
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Comments
21It's important to remember, that the top mixers are normally working with less then stella productions.
One thing that can happen, is when we get better at beat making, our beats tend to sound good enough. We balance the sounds, and maybe apply some reverb etc... and it's good to go!
The problem when we compare to top mixers, is our mixes tend to sound vanilla.
A great quality production, can lead to a lazy mix down.
So, a trick we can do. Use crap headphones, your built in pc speakers. Any poor quality audio monitoring device. Produce your beat like this.
Then when you mix down, you will really have a big challenge to make it sound good.
This is where, all the bussing and saturation, long effects chains come into play.
The goal is to separate the mix from the production stage. And then create a unique mix with it's own colour and character.
No disrespect but, I rather share mixing tricks with a community that likes and appreciate my mixing tricks. I say if you have nothing positive or constructive to say about any of these producers style, mix, and unique style then don't say nothing. There are a couple of producers here that are over rated and sound just like all the producers here. There is also hardly any originality, but you don't se me hating or putting them down. Or even telling them how their beat should be made. Me personally I take CONTRUCTIVE criticism well, but that lacks here. I've voted on a lot of Battles and the hating and negativity in the comments was ridiculous before the update. There is no perfect mix. There is no perfect Master. As long as everything is loud enough with no clipping, compressed, and EQ'd right. The color and character is the recipe that makes you who you are
Your right but all that can be right with your own texture style and some know it all will fight you saying it’s not mixed or mastered right. That’s all I’m saying
Disagree. There is a perfect mix, and a perfect master. The one where the song sounds solid on anything you play it on. That's a perfect mix, and that is a perfect master.
Yeah some might want a more plain sounding mix, and others may want lots of saturation, or might be going for a certain vibe. I can understand that fa sho.
Yup
Okay....
So...
Some other mixing tricks are. Leave a big gap between, creating your beat and mixing it.
The life cycle of a beat, is a mysterious thing.
Think of your beats like templates. Don't hesitate, to go back to previous beats, and steal things from them.
Maybe you got the lead line right. Or the chords. What ever it is, it can be recycled.
This is maybe a bit hard, to reconcile nowadays.
In the old days, producers, use to create something new every time they went into the lab.
A big problem nowadays, is that people are working from the same template over and over again.
It's a programmatical perspective. They go to youtube, download the same drum sounds, same hot lead, same samples etc.
Everything becomes very homogenised. This is probably the biggest benefit of using hardware. You have an experimentation stage.
Of course you can do this with software. But you have to take time out from beat making, and just spend time exploring sounds and different musical ideas.
The general rule is, as long as you learn one new thing for every beat you make, your time is not wasted.
The truth is, quantity is not really valuable to anyone. You should always be trying to create the best beat you have ever made in your life!
And.... the next understanding is. As long as you really like what you are doing. It, doesn't really matter if other people do. The reward of choosing to do music. Is music itself.
Lol, ain't no money in this game!
Well I suppose you can advertise for female vocalists, but that will probably get you in trouble nowadays. Too many spoil sports imo.
Another mixing trick.
If you going to write and mix your beat on the same day. Most of us don't have the luxury of running our monitors all the time, as they annoy other people.
So if your using heaphones, opt for a small light pair of cans. I use the dirty cheap song zx ones.
I have them at a low volume. The reason is, when you use the big bassey can's to write your beats on, by the time you finished, your ears are already very fatigued. The problem is, you don't notice your ears are tired. Use your big can's or your monitors for just putting in the big elements, like the main levels. And then check on the final mix with them, and tweak a bit.
On the subject of headphones. I never owned a pair of expensive cans in all my career as bobchops. I only recently bought some. I was surprised to say the least. I was expecting to be blown away by them. But actually I ended up sending both the expensive Mackie and Sony headphones back.
The Mackies, just sounded horrible. So BRIGHT! it was like having my ears scrapped. The expensive Sony ones, which were industry standard, sounded ok. But I actually much preferred the $40 extra bass sony headphones, I normally use as my heavy pair.
Bassy cans will make you tame the bass, the bright cans will make you tame the highs. So a mix on bass heavy cans will sound weak when played on different systems, and a mix done on bright cans, will sound LoFi on most other systems. A good solid, and low budget headphone is the Sennheiser HD280 Pro. You can get them for under $100 / pounds / Euros usually, and they are also included in many of the virtual mixrooms headphone models, so you can use a virtual mixroom like Abbey Road Studio 3, or CLA Nx, and kind of have the ability to mix on monitors while in your headphones. At least you have the ability to check your mix on those different modeled speakers in the virtual mixroom to have an idea of how your mix could sound on different setups. Also Slate VSX is an interesting system, and comes with it's own headphones.
A last ditch effort idea is to mix on the headphones you know and like and are familiar with. Get the mix to your liking, then check it with Tonal Balance Control to make any fine adjustments to be sure it will translate anywhere, and it will.
A good mix is hardly "vanilla". There can be plenty of character, and vibe in a great sounding mix. If we are talking about the top mixers like "Serban Ghenea" well we have to consider the context of how he receives material to mix.
Most of what he mixes is already "pre-mixed" by the producer. They usually send protools sessions with tons of plugins put on by the producer who did his own rough mix, and also had a lot of creative plugins in the mix as well. For instance like transient shapers, and Lofi bit crusher effects, or some plugin that overemphasizes the subs on a kick drum etc. Or they also perhaps added saturators, and other stuff to liven up the sound a bit. Since those are creative decisions, and the producer could really give a rip about aliasing or digital distortion, and somehow that was part of the vibe, Serban has to work within those parameters. So he will use a vanilla colorless plain digital EQ / channel strip across his whole session, and a few waves plugins (not the ones that emulate gear for the most part but the ones that do corrective stuff like RBass, De-esser). So his preferred weapon of choice is the Metric Halo Channelstrip. It is a solid channel strip, but adds no mojo. It is a simple digital EQ and compressor / gate. But it gets the job done. He is not needing to add color to a mix, so he uses that and gets great results because the mix is already full of color in the tracks to begin with.
He might add a cool reverb or a delay on vocals, but his job is to balance those tracks, and make them sound like a record, and he does it better than most.
My suggestion for mixing on cans is anything from Sennheiser / OLLO / AKG /Beyerdynamic. Then get Sonarworks Reference for Headphones, and flatten them, so you can mix on a perfect flat responding headphone. Once you make it sound perfect there, then EQ wise it will be great anywhere. The only problems mixing on cans is getting the volume levels correct, applying reverb, balancing vocals, and adding too much bass. While it sounds cool on cans to pump the bass, it will blow a driver on a huge loudspeaker like the ones DJ's use at the club or at shows. If you intend your music to be played there, should use better monitoring or metering to be sure your mix will sound good, and not kill speakers at the same time.
A tool to help when mixing or when mastering is Izotope Tonal Balance Control. The "bass heavy" curve is the one where most Billboard hits are aiming for. I checked a few and they all seem to follow the bass heavy curve, not the genre specific curves, although they have been useful when I mixed Jazz records, and classic contemporary RnB styles.
Ok, I got complacent. You must adjust your levels on loud speakers. No matter how well you know your headphones, they just don’t reproduce things the same way.
That said you can still do most of your mix on cans. Things like reverb and delays etc are just nice doing on cans.
I am really amazed, again how different things work on speakers.
That said, I don’t like to write beats where I am just worried about the end mix down.
I am strong believer that it’s better to separate the stages.
I can totally hear when people are making musical choices based on their end mix down.
Normally it’s like their beat don’t have much life to it, or only works if you listen to it at high volume.
Really the beat should sound strong enough musically with no mix down.
The benefits on mixing with cans is being able to hear all the tiny details you might miss on speakers. The downside to mixing on cans is getting the volume levels correct. Especially when mixing vocals, and people have a tendency to make the reverb too wet when mixing on cans, that shows up glaringly bad on speakers.
Think about the way people listen to music today. Earbuds. Rarely do I ever see anyone using a system using speakers at home. Car speakers are more common and they have a different deal as well. But again, look at the current audience and mix to said majority.
Beyerdynamic DT990 Pro 250 Ohm and the Rupert Neve RNHP are my go to for mixing. My latest mixes uses this combination and they have allowed me to make much better mixing choices that translates to care, phone, and computer headphone listening.
Problem with that is... earbuds do not produce the entire audio spectrum. Your goal if you are your own mixing engineer is to get mixes that translate everywhere. You need to focus on getting the midrange correct, but do not neglect your subs, and treble. Most issues with producers on here is that they over compensate on the subs. They have bass clashing with the kick drum, and basslines that bleed into the sub range with the kick drum and 808. Those headphones are quite nice, but once again, getting your levels correct. You never want to mix only for the most common listening environment. You never want to mix on airpods because that mix will not translate well to the car, but also have we forgotten, the club. Artists will be performing to these songs live, and you don't want an airpod mix going to the club environment.
I think you can use those headphones for making EQ decisions because you can hear the details, but to set your volume faders, you need to do that on speakers. Bear in mind you will also make bass heavy mixes on headphones because you are not feeling the bass when you mix like you would if you worked that out on a subwoofer. But your subwoofer needs to be in balance with your nearfield monitors or you will cut too much bass as well.
If you have 8in monitors then you don't need a subwoofer. But yeah, don't skimp on your monitoring. Even if you mix in a shitty room, if you are used to that room, then you can use it. But you can't compensate much for shitty monitoring. You will make bad decisions on everything with bad monitors.
The 8 inch speakers are dope!
but having the room designed with bass traps etc, for reflections.. is hard.
I have 5inch mackie monitors and the sub.
there good! But I can't use them and have not for years.
I just mix on cans because I don't want to get complaints from the neighbours.
Nowadays...
it's hard to justify putting in time on big mixes of beats.
ok if you have a project. But nowadays I only feel that I would really put hard work into mixing, when I make a beat that lives up to my beat making hero's.
If I make a beat that makes me feel like "we there now".
I would go in on the mixing.
Is it even possible for that to happen for me now?
the music I like is from over a decade ago. And the producers in those days had crazy motivation because they wanted to be a super producer. And the money was big!
nowadays producing is different. Would those dope producers who got me interested in this, even get any recognition today?
I look at my game now, and realise, there's a lot of things those master producers could do that I don't know how to do.
just having that weird perfect taste they have. Maybe that's a biology thing, and not something that can be fixed.
some people naturally have a weird brain that hears things in a weird way.
Not really a trick but y'all have to get hip to MixBox on all platforms. Game changer
Looks a lot like Slate VMR.
Just heard it. Sounds great! Didn't know they had a free version! I really like the digital reverb they have and that limiter seems to warm things up pretty nice.
In my humble opinion I think that modern music can benefit from a vintage sound and workflow.
Think of mixing and mastering in 3 stages.
Recording - Mixing - Mastering.
Recording (even if you are totally in the box).
You would typically go to a studio back in the day to record, and get everything "tracked" to 24 inch reel to reel tape.
During that process your music would come off your keyboard, drum machine etc, and then assigned to 2 mono tracks or 1 on the board, then to the tape. Along the way that signal from your MPC or ASR-10 or EPS etc would hit a preamp, then the channel strip of the console, then out to the tape machine.
How would you do this process in the box? Well, while making the beat you obviously are going to assign your sounds to tracks on your mixer in your DAW. Then add a console channel strip first on your channel, then a tape plugin. Pick whatever channel strip you like as long as it has some saturation, and vibe. Think of the Waves Magma channel strip, or Lindell 80 series or the Lindell 50 series, whatever you like as your tracking board sound. You could use the Slate VCC, and pick a console sound from that. Then after the channel strip, then add your tape plugin. So, UAD Studer, Softube tape, Slate VTM, TB Reelbus etc. Do this on all channels.
Next, export your stems / tracks.
Now you could re-import them into your DAW, or use a different one that has a better workflow for mixing. I like to use Harrison Mixbus 32C, but you could import your project into protools, or reaper, or back into FL Studio if you want, I think Reason has an SSL console in the software as the mixer, just know this is now a mixing session.
Back in the day during mixing, that would be done on a console, sometimes in the same studio, but not uncommon to do it in a different studio.
During the mixing, you would pick a channel strip that is clean sounding, so think SSL channel strips either from SSL themselves or from any 3rd party software maker that makes emulations of SSL console channel strips. So Waves, Plugin Alliance, UAD etc. You don't have to worry about this if you are using Harrison Mixbus, Reason, or Cakewalk, as they already have the console setup for you.
Setup your master bus processing, that can be for many using the "God Particle" which is all you need on your master bus in my opinion, or use a SSL bus compressor. In Harrison Mixbus, Reason, and Cakewalk you already have the master bus setup for you. You can choose to use the stock master bus processing it is perfectly fine. For those using FL Studio, Protools etc, you will need the God Particle or an SSL bus comp on your master bus. Also add a tape plugin on your master bus too, as all mixes were printed to master tape back in the day.
Do your mix, then glue the mix with the master bus processing, then export your wav file of your mixing session.
Now on to mastering, usually your mix that was printed to master tape would then go to a mastering house. You can choose to use an online mastering service, if your mix is good and you are happy with the results, that would be fine, or you can make a new session in your DAW for a mastering session. Some plugins that are popular for mastering are Ozone of course, BX Masterdesk, Fabfilter total bundle, or create your own mastering chain probably with Bax EQ, shadowhills mastering compressor, a tape machine plugin (yes another one), a limiter, a multiband compressor, a clean digital EQ like a stock one or pro Q3 etc. Fix the tonal balance, make it loud, but not too loud, and make sure it sounds great everywhere. Then export to WAV or Mp3 or M4a or FLAC etc, and distribute your music. Back in the day they would make a hard copy master for you to send to distribution to make your CDs, tapes, records etc for you to sell in stores, or to distribute how you like.
I think if you stick to this process, your music will always sound great.